Semper Fi Fellow Veterans!
By Kevin A. Lehmann on in Kevin's Commentary, Politics, US Military
With every passing year, we are rapidly losing veterans of the “Greatest Generation,” at the rate of 1500 a day, making each successive Veterans Day that much more meaningful. While every person who ever served in the Armed Forces has reason to be proud, it was the greatest generation—those extraordinary men and women who served during the most perilous of times—that we owe the greatest debt of gratitude, and me in particular. Let me explain . . .
As a first generation American, it was the Allied Forces (US and Russian) that liberated Berlin, Germany. Unlike JFK, my father was a real Berliner. Raised in Berlin under Hitler’s Nazi regime, he experienced “chewing gum” for the first time in his life when American soldiers rolled through the streets of Berlin tossing out candy and chewing gum to all the German kids. My father was ten years old at the time.
The freedom he, his sister and their mother felt (their father [my grandfather] was a medic in the German army) at that point in time had such a profound impact on my father, he left Germany in October, 1953 and headed for America at the ripe young age of eighteen.
A year later, my father joined the American Army and achieved his American citizenship the old fashioned way . . . he earned it. But only after he learned how to fluidly speak English and thoroughly learn American history. He was an MP and served in the Army for three years.
For the ten years preceding his passing in 2005—out of his love and respect for the greatest generation—my father donned vintage WW II Army uniforms and hung out at all the war memorials in Washington D.C., and Bedford, VA where more WWII soldiers died per capita than anywhere else in the United States. He often gave history lessons (American) to visiting tourists and especially school children. My father despised the title “German American,” stating emphatically that there should be no distinction between bona fide citizens— “An America of one.”
James Knipple and I joined the Marine Corps under the delayed entry program in 1981. Little did we realize at the time that one of us would become a hero, forever immortalized in the hearts and minds of those affected by the Marine Corps barracks bombing in Beruit, Lebanon, October 23, 1983.
To Jim, my father, Joseph Ambrose—a WWI veteran seen in the picture holding the flag that draped the coffin of his son, a veteran who died in the Korean War—and all military personnel past and present—Happy Veterans Day 11/11/11.
I honor you, I love you, and I salute you.
Semper Fi,
Kevin A. Lehmann
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